En Français

Music rehearsals for Faust are going well. The men have more to sing than the women this time so they had one more rehearsal than we did. We still have three more music rehearsals with Maestro Davis before Maestro Lyall comes into town for staging.
My studies in French are developing at a slow pace. Our Production Manager, Cat, said a simple sentence to me in French the other day and I had to ask her to translate. Some days it feels like one step forward and two steps back. My goal is to be able to understand the French of Faust in my head as I am performing rather than just singing the words with only a concept of the text. I wish I had taken French in college rather than trying to learn it on my own now. Faust and other French operas would be a lot easier to sing if I knew what I was saying!
The music of Faust is not difficult. There are a couple of possible tricky parts, but I don’t see any train wrecks so far. We have two sections that are sung rather fast, depending on Maestro’s tempo, and at least one part that is very slow, again depending on Maestro. The fast parts make the language difficult and the slow parts make breathing (breath control) hard. I plan on using repetition to get the fast language to flow fluently and staggered breathing to make it through the slow moments.
So far I feel rather confident with the memorization of the words and music. I hope I am not being overly optimistic. Only time will tell how well I learn French and Faust.